(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

[cw: food]


(previously on)

Variety is a nice place to *visit*, but god I would *not* want to live here. How do y'all *cope* not eating mostly the same things at mostly the same times of day?

The *occasional* break is nice, but for the most part I like predictability, and not-being-overwhelmed-by-options, and diets that have been carefully spread out across a bunch of food categories in hopes of avoiding malnutrition (apparently successfully).

Comments

[sigmaleph]

I don't particularly crave variety and eat more or less the same things out of simplicity (i.e. I don't like cooking and mostly have figured out how to make a small number of very simple meals and live off that) but I tend to vary a lot re: times of day. At least, relative to what I understand is typical? lunch happens somewhere between 12 and 15, dinner happens somewhere between 20 and midnight. Earlier ends of those ranges are more likely, if nothing else because I get hungry.

(breakfast happens when I wake up, ofc, which is typically 9 to 11 these days but much earlier when I have work)

[brin_bellway]

I don't eat at *exactly* the same times of day, but my windows are narrower than yours.

A normal day for me, food-wise, looks something like this:

• Somewhere between 8:30 - 9:30: Wake up


• 10 - 11:30 (partially depending on what time I woke up): A cranberry-yogurt high-fibre granola bar


• 12 - 13: Three scoops of peanut butter on a teaspoon


• 14 - 15:30: Two chocolate-covered almonds


• 17:50 - 18:40 (aiming for 18, but often not quite managing it): Dinner (I cooked Tuesday's dinner myself, so it makes a particularly good example: one-third of a 9-inch-diameter (four-egg) crustless mushroom quiche, with a side of crispy potatoes)


• 19:15 - 20:45: Six chocolate-covered almonds


• 21 - 22: One single-serving mango-applesauce cup


• 22 - 23: One potful (maybe eight cups?) of stove-popped popcorn in canola oil


• 23:45 - 00:30: Bedtime

(Note: I am aware that this is not a great deal of food. Rest assured that my weight remains stable: I am blessed with the combination of a low metabolism and equally low appetite.

(I mean that unironically: I like that I don't need a very large food budget to survive, and that I don't have to fight my subconscious sense of how much food I should eat in order to eat the *actual* right amount.))


Common variations:

• If I'm working a lunch shift, peanut butter on a spoon is replaced by scarfing down a peanut butter granola bar in the back between customers. (Legally you don't get a meal break if your shift is five hours or less, but I am not a three-meals-a-day person and usually cannot comfortably go five waking hours without eating.)


• If I'm working a dinner shift, dinner is one hour before work starts (often crowding out the mid-afternoon chocolate), and if the dinner shift runs later than 19:30 I will usually either buy a dessert there (it's pretty cheap with an employee discount) or bring a few pieces of individually wrapped chocolate if I happen to have any lying around, again scarfing the food down in the back between customers.


• If I'm unusually hungry, I'll eat a piece of fruit in either the late afternoon or the late evening (replacing the (smaller) applesauce cup). If it's been more than a couple days since I had a piece of fruit and I'm *not* unusually hungry, I'll replace the applesauce cup *and* the popcorn with one apple.


• If I'm unusually *non*-hungry, I'll make a smaller batch of popcorn or skip it completely. I aim to have popcorn at *least* three times a week, and on as many days as possible.

[redsixwing]

Hee. I think you and I come from opposite ends of the spectrum on this one.

That said, mm, peanut butter.

[contrarianarchon]

... how is your life or taste predictable enough that you can plan? I can barely make sure I have the ingredients for the cuisine I want to cook are in the house on a semi-regular basis!

(Part of the answer then is "food is a hobby; cooking and eating many tasty things is a deep-seated joy", and the fact that I eat more food (total), but much less often; the last few days I've been eating a lot of sandwiches (like 7-8 in two meals each day) but I'll get bored of that soon enough, no doubt, and do something else. And of course the sandwiches have had different things in them every meal (highlights include smoked salmon and all the suitable fixings; some chicken slices I got half off and ate with barbecue sauce and jalapeno slices; leftover Korean-flavoured (with apple-juice, chilli powder and doenjang, as well as more normal flavorings like garlic, ginger, stock powder) pork mince that I couldn't be bothered cooking rice to eat it on)

For me predictability in eating a logistical constraint imposed by the limits of my skill and ability to economically stock my kitchen (and my own taste in food, which cuts out a lot of stuff otherwise within the search-space). If I ate the same thing every day I'd be *so bored* even if they were the things I liked best in the world! My food budget is *substantially* economized from what it might be; there's lots of stuff I'd love to eat if I thought the cost-benefit was worth it. (There's also a lot of common-sense optimization that I get the impression lots of people don't do re: making sure you actually buy cost-efficient versions of things, but that's pretty trivial; I'm talking about, like, the fact that one of my staple ("I eat this multiple times a month") recipes properly uses gunicale, which costs 700 krona a kilo so I use bacon which costs 160 instead, unless it's my birthday or I really would like it)

[brin_bellway]

My standard diet does drift, but gradually. In mid-November I began phasing out Nutri-Grain berry-filled cereal bars in favour of the cranberry-yogurt fibre bars, and in early January I finished eating through my Nutri-Grain stockpile and completed the transition. Further back I'd been eating single-serving fruit yogurts for breakfast, but in 2017 I phased those out, primarily as a cost-cutting measure (though I've found the shelf-stability to be very helpful as well). Around 2010 or so (my food diary only goes back to October 2012) I switched from chocolate-covered peanuts to almonds: I think that one was partly an availability thing and partly being able to get dark chocolate, with maybe some just "trying almonds and deciding I liked them better". Various possible dinners fade in and out of likelihood, and also dinnertime varies depending on people's work schedules: when I was a kid we'd generally eat dinner when Dad got home (which often wasn't until 20:30), and for a while there a couple years ago we were eating dinner at 16 so my parents could eat before leaving for dinner shift.

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>>Part of the answer then is "food is a hobby; cooking and eating many tasty things is a deep-seated joy"<<

I do remember spending more mental energy on food planning back when my appetite was a little too high for my metabolism (steadily gaining 5 lb/year), before the 2012 illness knocked it into place†. I still had much the same assortment of usual foods back then, though: I just ate a greater number of those options on any given day (I remember I used to eat plain cheddar quite a bit, which I rarely have room for anymore), and I think there was a lot more variation in [which foods were eaten when] *other* than breakfast, dinner, and dessert.

(Oh, also, much more chocolate: I *do* have some records of that from before because I was trying to figure out how many bags I needed to buy to stay in stock and how many Dad was sneaking out of the bag in the middle of the night, and there were a lot of days with 12 or 16 almonds, sometimes even getting into the 20s.)

I'm not sure whether I enjoyed eating more back then, or if I just thought about it more. Nowadays, while I definitely get *some* pleasure from food, and I do spend ~all of my entertainment budget at restaurants and the more expensive sections of grocery stores, I never feel *ecstatic* about food the way some people do. (I always think of Ada Palmer's food-blogging posts--and especially this interview--when I think of this, but it's really not uncommon for me to encounter people who seem to be taking more pleasure in their food than I ever do.)

Mind you, I'm not fond of strong emotions in general, so there's that. I'm happy with the tradeoff--if indeed it is a tradeoff--of lower-but-stable levels of food enjoyment. Peanut butter on a spoon is never ecstatic, but it remains pleasurable after eating it day after day for years. I even missed it during Passover: ended up making a batch of almond-cheddar biscuits so I could have some nuts.

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>>My food budget is *substantially* economized from what it might be; there's lots of stuff I'd love to eat if I thought the cost-benefit was worth it.<<

I once saw a thought experiment of an "infinite buffet" (although I think "Star Trek replicator" might be a better way of putting it): the idea being, if money and preparation effort were not factors, what would you choose to eat?

I was actually in a situation not so far off from that once, when I was at Disney World and Mom had wrangled some promotions into giving us a meal plan with far more credits than we could possibly use. Empirically, the main changes are that I eat a lot more salmon and significantly more [variations on "pasta with cheese sauce"]. (Though I'm not sure how much of the salmon was because of knowing that the situation was temporary, and I would soon be returning to the normal world where salmon is--by a significant margin--the most expensive thing I eat.)

When I was better off financially, I ate salmon about 1 - 3 times a week, went to the bakery once a week, and went to restaurants once or twice a month. I think those were somewhere around the ideal frequencies for me, and I hope I can return to that someday.

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>>gunicale, which costs 700 krona a kilo<<

*researches*

...did you put too many zeroes in that number or something? Does cured pork cheek actually cost ninety-five CAD a kilo? (And pork bacon over twenty-one a kilo?)

*more research*

Oh. Here's a place in Toronto that (as of January 2019) was selling it for $97/kg. I guess it really is just that expensive. (And apparently pork bacon costs like $17/kilo at No Frills, so $21.60 is actually not ridiculous. It seems I just don't have a good sense of how much this kind of thing should cost, not normally eating it myself.)

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†Mom sometimes claims that maybe the timing was just a coincidence and--being eighteen--I had simply reached my adult set point, but if that were the case I'd have gained back the weight I lost to the illness. (I never did: since then my weight has hovered within a ~5-lb range the *high* end of which is the weight I had immediately post-illness.) I think I just didn't *have* a set point before, or possibly a much higher one.

[contrarianarchon]

>> Pork Pricing

To be clear that's the cheapest pork bacon on the market as well - smallgoods are hecking expensive here. (I could get decent bacon for 8-11 dollars (AUD) a kilo back home whereas I'm getting bad bacon for those prices; guanciale I had a lot of trouble tracking down back home but I'm pretty sure it was still like half as costly when I could find it; it's worth noting that nearly every pasta dish with bacon in it is better with guanciale, and you get relatively little pork cheek per pig compared to any other cut of meat?)

>>Arbitrary food generator?

... what does it do well? Well-done food is better than expensive food. But there'd be so much to try! Right now I particularly want Loh Bak and Bahn Mi because the places I normally buy those from are a continent away but also probably roast pork would be nice, as would the infinite variety of Things-I-will-love-but-haven't-met-yet that no doubt exist on such a system. Also just like stuff I don't have the guts to ask for on first instinct like smoked salmon and fish-roe canapes (which my mother makes for my grandmother's birthday and which are really good), and many things which I don't generally even try because of the cost. I'm drooling at the thought... (I ... should learn to roast things. Or more immediately go fry that cheap pork I bought up and eat that, actually)

>> Pasta with cheese sauce

... I need to get better at cheese sauce! I mostly make it bechamel-type and it usually comes out excessively floury. I think that means I need to use less flour and cook it longer?

>>weight set-point

I ... should probably keep track of my weight, shouldn't I? Bleh that means I should add "A scale that works for people" to the list of random household items I need to get ahold of when I get home. I don't particularly think it's a problem though; I don't have any perception of gaining weight? *shrugs*

[contrarianarchon]

Also to be totally clear - I didn't think you literally never changed your diet but drift in tastes/optimizations over a scale of years and drifts in tastes/optimizations over the scale of days are not comparable

[brin_bellway]

>>I mostly make it bechamel-type and it usually comes out excessively floury. I think that means I need to use less flour and cook it longer?<<

Yeah, probably. I do have trouble with flouriness sometimes when I make it that way. Another way we do it sometimes is to use heavy cream and no roux, instead simmering down the cream to the desired thickness. More diabetic-friendly that way, for Mom.

While flouriness has been an issue, the main problem I'm having is greasiness. It seems to be worse with the roux method--perhaps because of the butter--but even the cream method is often too greasy. I've been getting more sensitive to greasy foods over the years, and I worry that someday I won't be able to enjoy cheese sauce at all without a stomachache. (Although eating fruit immediately after a problematic food seems to help, so that's something.)

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>>drift in tastes/optimizations over a scale of years and drifts in tastes/optimizations over the scale of days are not comparable<<

Fair.

[contrarianarchon]

>> greasiness

- I don't have this problem myself but my memory of serious eats attributes greasiness in cheese sauces to the cheese breaking and that you need an/a better emulsification? IDK if "this food has large amounts of fat in it" is your problem though, this wouldn't help with that?

See: https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/01/how-to-use-cornstarch-and-evaporated-milk-to-make-stable-emulsion-cheese-sauce.html
https://www.seriouseats.com/2015/10/the-food-lab-fifteen-minute-stovetop-macaroni-and-cheese-recipe-food-lab-book-excerpt.html
?
Note: I haven't tried these because it would require buying new ingredients I don't normally keep around, so it's on the metaphorical back-burner.

[brin_bellway]

Good to know, but yeah, I'm pretty sure the problem is with the fat itself. Reheating cheese sauce in the microwave breaks the emulsion pretty hard, and while the resulting sauce *tastes* subjectively greasier, it actually causes *fewer* problems (now that a lot of the fat is sitting in a drainage puddle of oil at the other end of the bowl, rather than in my food).

There's a couple of foods--spanakopita, pizza from a specific local pizzeria (homemade doesn't need this, and neither does Domino's)--where I deliberately prepare/obtain them in advance because I like the texture of their microwaved versions better. Maybe cheese sauce will end up like that, albeit not for textural reasons.

Or I might go looking around for and experimenting with ideas on lower-fat cheese sauces. Low-fat recipes tend to carry a lot of assumptions I don't share about "weight loss" and "calorie counting" and "guilt", and I hear Mom complaining about them a lot because of all the people who tried to push her into eating that way (which is exactly the wrong move, for her particular physiology), but there's probably some useful stuff in there. Even as a kid, when this was much less of an issue and I could happily eat as many cheese crackers as I wanted, I noticed that when 3 Musketeers switched to a new "45% less fat" formula, I was abruptly able to eat an entire bar without a stomachache.

[contrarianarchon]

Makes sense! And yeah, I suppose those won't help, then. Good luck finding suitable substitutions!